Purdy: Cal takes short ride home after loss to Syracuse

SAN JOSE -- Hey, look on the bright side for Cal. At least the Golden Bears didn't have to think about their disappointing NCAA tournament loss on a long plane ride home Saturday night.

Because there was no long plane ride to make. It was just an hourlong bus ride back from HP Pavilion to Berkeley after the Bears' 66-60 defeat by Syracuse that wasn't as close as the score made it seem. Or as intense as Cal might have made it, given the stakes and setting.

"You'd like to have played your best basketball," Cal coach Mike Montgomery said about his team's performance. "You'd like to have really gone out and forced the other team to make plays. I don't think we played our best basketball."

Cal was an underdog to the tournament-tested Orange. And the Bears certainly should be given credit for making it to a round of 32 with Thursday's upset of UNLV. But that feat led to such high hopes for Saturday, a rare chance to play an NCAA game so close to home.

A victory would have sent Cal to the Sweet Sixteen. Instead, the season ended with a sour and large thud. The sour and smaller thuds happened earlier, when the Bears' shots -- especially from 3-point range -- kept banging off the rim.

And in reality, those 3-point attempts over the top of Syracuse's too-swampy-to-penetrate zone defense were Cal's best hope. Syracuse plays superior zone defense every week, every day, all day long.

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Other college teams play zones that are Sudoku games, intriguing but solvable. Syracuse's zone is a Rubik's Cube -- solvable only after extra effort. Saturday, the Bears tried to work some high-post-to-low-post action and gather points on dunks where the zone's soft spot was located. But the players' unfamiliarity with that strategy -- and the short prep time -- led to sloppy execution.

"It's going to be difficult playing against something you've never played against before," said forward Richard Solomon, Cal's top scorer with 22 points. "A scout team can't run it the way they run it. They're long and athletic."

With the down-low plan not working consistently, it was left to those 3-point shooters. And the final Cal tally from beyond the arc was a miserable 4 for 21.

It is also safe to say that junior guard Allen Crabbe, the Bears' best player and a candidate to enter the NBA draft, did not boost his candidacy Saturday. He finished with just eight points on 3-for-9 shooting. The Orange's zone constantly morphed to deny Crabbe the ball or surround him when he did get it.

"The shots that I thought I would probably get weren't there," Crabbe said. "They took things away from me."

In one final ignominy, after Crabbe helped create a turnover with about two minutes left with the Bears behind by eight points, putting them in position to pull within five with a 3-pointer ... thud, again. Crabbe had trouble handling the ball and stepped out of bounds.

"We didn't have a lot of people that were playing above their ability," Montgomery said, naming no names. "We didn't have a whole bunch of people that rose to the occasion that this was a big game and I'm going to play better than I have. You're not going to win games like that unless you have some people able to do that."

Cal's best highlight probably came about three minutes into the second half, when the Bears pulled within six points after freshman guard Tyrone Wallace finally did rise up on the zone perimeter and drop in a 3-pointer.

At that point, for the first time all evening, the Cal-dominated sellout crowd of 18,030 erupted in a Berkeley-ish bellow.

It lasted for about 30 seconds. Syracuse, a team full of seasoned dagger-shooters and lane-slashers from the Big East, went to the basket and was fouled and scored seven consecutive points on free throws, as Cal scored none. From there, it was an all-but-inevitable ride to the finish.

Montgomery, at one point in the second half, unveiled a standard position when he is frustrated. He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling while using his clasped hands to draw one knee into a cross-legged position. Then he filled his cheeks with air and blew out the carbon dioxide.